To Plan, Perchance, To Think; Aye, There's The Rub

By Stuart Wells

Stuart Wells, author of Choosing the Future: The Power of Strategic Thinking, is Professor of Organization and Management and San Jose State University. He can be reached at stuartwells@leadingedge.net.

While we can decide what we will doour strategywe cannot guarantee that the world we knew and the world we predicted when we choose a course of action will be the same when we are actually carrying out those actions.

To Plan, Perchance, To Think

A plan to go to the store later in the day to buy groceries is

quite different from a plan that we label '"strategic." In the former case, our thought process is straightforward and, probably, rather automatic. We are determining what we would like to eat and we know where the store is located. Although we are planning for the future, the content of that plan is predetermined. We are operating on relatively known information from the past and present and there is little uncertainty in our ability to carry out the plan. The situation is fairly simple with little complexity or ambiguity. The environment is stable, there are few factors subject to change, and we can be confident that the consequences of our actions are predictable. A plan is the product of thinking. Obviously, we are thinking to derive and implement a simple plan but there is usually no attentiveness to how we are thinking. Unfortunately, these common experiences with planning reinforce our belief that we can plan without thinking. Just do it.

When the plan is strategic in nature, what is unknowable, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous greatly increases. Our thought process needs to be significantly different from the easy plan, and it has to be deliberate and conscious. Automatic thinking, which is thinking using pre-existing patterns, will not work. It reflects an implicit belief that the future will be similar to the past. Rather than concern ourselves with strategic planning, we ought to be more focused on the clarity of thinking required for strategy.

In strategy, we are trying to convert information to knowledge to a decision about a course of action in the future. We can only have information and knowledge about the past or present. The future is not known; it exists only in our minds. While we can decide what we will doour strategywe cannot guarantee that the world we knew and the world we predicted when we choose a course of action will be the same when we are actually carrying out those actions. Hence, even during the implementation of strategy, we cannot escape the continuing need for thinking. If the world would only remain static, unchanging, or at least reliably predictable, strategy would be as simple as going to the grocery store.

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Strategic Thinking Process

Strategic thinking, as any process, has three simple phases: input, transform, and output.

In strategic thinking, we label these process phases as perceiving, understanding, and reasoning. A thinking process should feel natural and fluid. The input phase naturally flows into the transform phase, which in turn naturally flows into the output phase. The line between perceiving and understanding or understanding and reasoning is not a wall but a highly permeable membrane. The purpose of using three phases in thinking is not to force thoughts into proper categories; it is to carry thoughts through a natural progression. It is best for the mind to grasp the entirety of the process and move among the phases rather than concentrate in lock-step fashion on one phase after the other. The purpose of the process is not to have you categorize thoughts you already have, but to organize them in a systematic fashion so that new thoughts can emerge. It should aid intelligence, not stifle it. It should enable us to confront ambiguity and complexity and be able to see a path through it.

These three phases can be summarized in three simple questions that ultimately are quite challenging to fully answer:

· What seems to be happening?

· What possibilities do we face?

· What are we going to do about it?

We are working on three phases that challenge us to rethink and add to our expertise, reconsider existing patterns of thought, see the world through different perspectives, integrate a range of complex elements, project possible futures, see areas for opportunities and threats, determine how to match our capabilities with this world, see pathways for our strategy, choose a strategy, and foresee the road, potholes, and deviations that could occur as we implement our strategic decision. This is a range of complex and integrated thought. If we do not pay attention to our thinking, we collapse under it. Rather than use our intelligence to embrace and manage the complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty inherent in this process, we frequently avoid it and ignore the world as it is. The drive to practicality that has us trying to get things done quickly and minimize the time we spend on thinking is a remarkable detachment from reality. Ignoring what may be difficult to know is impractical and ultimately detrimental to the long-run health of the organization.

Perceiving

The thinking process phase that addresses how one builds the relevant knowledge base.

Perceiving is an expansive process. It has no limit. The questionwhat seems to be happeningis an obvious perceiving question as there is no limit to the amount of knowledge one can build about the world surrounding an organization. There are various playerscustomers,

clients, competitors, partners, suppliers, and so forth.

Each player has a perspective on the world and something they are trying to produce or create. Their decisions to act and their plans, are influenced by a variety of economic, technological, social, legal, and cultural forces. This phase of perceiving is more than gathering data; its ultimate purpose is building a knowledge base. It is not the data sitting in the computer system, but the knowledge people individually and collectively hold about the environment surrounding the firm. We begin to build a knowledge base when we use our thinking to determine whether all these data reveal patterns of thinking or behavior, and when we are able to see the world through the perspective of different players.

Patterns can lock people into existing ways of thinking and behaving. When it happens, we may fail to see how the world is changing. We are certainly not thinking "outside the box." Instead, we are in it. When our competitors are in the box, we can rejoice. When our customers or clients are in the box, we may have trouble helping them see new possibilities. When we see the world through the perspective of our competitors, we try to understand how they are thinking and how they might respond to changes in the future and our own strategic initiatives. When we see the world through the eyes of our customers or clients, we understand what they are trying to do. We know how our product or service enables them to move forward by providing the value they are seeking. We need to see the product or service through their eyes. This requires deliberate thought or we will simply see our efforts through our own eyes. We will be back in the box.

In the perceiving phase, we look in depth at the pieces of a puzzlethe various forces and players and put all that together into a few focused pictures that give us alternative and meaningful views of the future. We develop scenarios that are complete pictures of what the world could look like.

Understanding

The thinking process phase that addresses how one determines the significance or use of the knowledge base.

The understanding phase has much more focus. With the questionwhat possibilities do we facewe begin a serious effort to pay attention to some things and take the risk of ignoring other things. The scenarios from the perceiving phase are our knowledge-based projections of the future reflecting possible decisions and behavior of players as forces influence them. Having several distinctive scenarios indicates the degree of uncertainty we have about the future. Each of these futures contains the seeds and the potential blossoming of opportunities. We match these opportunities with the organization's existing and possible strengths. This matching determines the possibilities available; the organization simply cannot take every opportunity, even when its competitors are positioned to capitalize on some of the same possibilities. It is useful to determine the most advantageous possibilities for grasping and influencing the evolving nature of the environment. Furthermore, we are looking at the interplay of threats posed by the environment with the weaknesses or vulnerability of the organization.

Reasoning

The thinking process phase that addresses useful conclusions or decisions to assure complete thinking so it is not simply contemplation of an issue but leads to some form of action.

The reasoning phase with the questionwhat are we going to do about itshould seem like a natural progression of thought initiated by identifying strategic possibilities. We have the challenging need to make a decision from all the possibilities. It means following one path and putting the rest aside. It is similar to going to a restaurant with many good choices but you can only eat one meal. We cast aside the other possibilities and we choose our future. To be more precise, we choose what we are going to do. The consequences of that action, and whether or not we can continue on that path, are still subject to changes in the environment. We look at this situation and typically conclude that we need to become proactive rather than reactive, and engage in contingency planning. I would say that we are doing something quite different. We need to shrink our response time to changes in forces or player decisions and actions. The assumptions we made as we looked at player perspectives, derived patterns, and formed scenarios could no longer be true. We try to identify triggers, some type of data or observable phenomenon that could alert us that our assumption is no longer valid and the strategic path may need altering.

A Final Thought on Thinking

We have followed a particular sequence of thinking going from perceiving to understanding to reasoning. Thinking is not sequential; it is cyclical. It is different from a physical process that must proceed in an order and is not reversible. We have only been thinking; we have not yet done anything. We have not begun to implement the strategy. Frequently, through our expertise in our industry, we have ideas about what we want to do. We are already starting with the reasoning phase and then move to the other phases to learn about the environment to test the strategic idea, determine what opportunities would need to exist to be conducive to this idea, and verify whether we have the appropriate strengths and capabilities to make the idea work. We could start in the understanding phase by focusing on core competenciesthose few things that the organization does consistently well through the collective capability of its personnel. Moving to the other two phases, the organization could then see what it needs to do to best leverage those competencies in the current and future environment. Whatever path we follow, whichever way we engage with the cycle of strategic thinking and its phases, we are choosing the future. Our decisions become part of the future that emerges. We can lead or influence the evolution that inevitably happens in most industries and professions.